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P2P Services Speak Out Against Gnutella2 264

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-want-my-p2p dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Three leading Gnultella services voice their opinions on Gnutella2 or Mike's Protocol as they refer to it as. None of the three recognize Gnutella2 as true Gnutella and worry its propritary protocol will divide the Gnutella community. In the first interview Vincent Falco of BearShare contributes his thoughts. The second interview gets input from Greg Blidson of LimeWire, and Arno Steenbekkers from XoloX."
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P2P Services Speak Out Against Gnutella2 More

P2P Services Speak Out Against Gnutella2

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  • ... P2P is already divided in too many protocols and such.
    • Perhaps I have not kept up with the latest P2P developments, but its almost impossible to imagine how Gnutella2 could possibly be Propietary. How is this even possible, that a new standard for a P2P protocol of all things, a systems that is decentralized without authority being propietary. Is this some kind of joke or a nightmare?
    • Can someone please explain to me why unity is always considered mandatory??

      I really don't understand what is supposed to drive genuine innovation if we demand that everyone (as much as possible, anywayz) is under one banner and doing the same thing. Why is having many different P2P protocols a bad thing? I always thought that this kind of diversity meant that, even if eventually there had to be only one, having large numbers initially would better facilitate the selection process.

      Read Darwin, people. Genuine technological development does not come about from rigid unity, but rather just the opposite. You have as many different prototypes, re-interpretations, code forks, or versions of whatever it is you're developing as possible. That way the most suitable model/s for the task are identified over time. The relevant salvageable features of the less suitable models can be taken and added to the more suitable ones, and the less suitable ones eventually fall away by themselves...naturally.

      This goes back to the entire Linux vs Windows question, where the thing people complain about is the idea of only having one system (Windows) where they can't make any of the decisions concerning the operating system for themselves.
      To me it makes a lot more sense if you don't just have Windows OR Linux, but rather that you have Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, the Mac OS, AmigaDOS, and so on, and if they all have their attendant fan/developer base. That way each system has it's particular use or area of strengths, and work continues on developing others for other uses as well. It also means that the user is free to choose what he/she thinks is the best system for the task at hand. Things get done, people are happy, freedom is maintained, and the world keeps turning. ;-)

      If you have a singular or monolithic model, this doesn't happen...instead we very often get saddled with frozen, unchanging dinosaurs. Is this really what we want?

  • I thought everyone used Kazaa (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bushboy ( 112290 ) <lttc@lefthandedmonkeys.org> on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:40PM (#5418792) Homepage
    I can't remember the last time I ever considered Gnutella as an operable and useful P2P application.

    It was a mission to connect and even more of a problem to actually download useful content !

    Unless you were a l33t bandwidth wh0r3, it remains to this day, a useless p2p application.

    Kazaa on the other hand actually works !
    On a low bandwidth pipe, you can still obtain large files, even if it takes you a week to do it.

    • unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rebelcool ( 247749 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:48PM (#5418829)
      kazaa cannot locate 90% of the rare music i look for.

      If you want popular or semi-popular things, kazaa works well. For rare things, you might, if lucky, find one person somewhere who has it and it almost always returns 'Needs more sources'.

      • Oth.net (Score:3, Informative)

        by Grendel Drago ( 41496 )
        For really weird or rare stuff, I check out oth.net [oth.net]. It's a search engine for ratio FTP sites. Some of them are scams. Ignore these. Also good for music videos.

        --grendel drago
      • For rare things, you might, if lucky, find one person somewhere who has it


        I looked up rare on m-w.com, here's the thrid definition.
        ---
        rare
        3 : seldom occurring or found
        ---

        If you are looking for a rare file, you will probably only find one or two people who have it regardless of what p2p software you use.


    • Kazaa only works on Windows.

    • Re:I thought everyone used Kazaa (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:58PM (#5418867) Journal
      I can't remember the last time I ever considered Gnutella as an operable and useful P2P application.

      Try gtk-gnutella out of CVS. Gnutella these days is a very, very different beast from what it once was (thanks to lots of work on the part of the GDF), and its performance is *far* better than it once was.

      The reason Kazaa doesn't work for everyone is because it's the last remaining closed P2P protocol. Linux folks can't clone it (and it's extremely difficult to reverse engineer the authentication stuff) because of that, so Kazaa isn't available for Linux.

      I've found that Napster for music, eDonkey for large files works pretty well.

      I wish more people used oggs, though...

      • Re:I thought everyone used Kazaa (Score:4, Informative)

        by peter_gzowski ( 465076 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @02:03PM (#5419174) Homepage
        I've found that Napster for music, eDonkey for large files works pretty well.

        I assume you mean KaZaA for music...

        Just a few comments on your comment. KaZaA (Lite) works in Linux under Wine. The KaZaA Lite site even links to instructions on how to get it working. The fact that KaZaA is a closed protocol is not the reason it doesn't work for everyone. No one program is going to work for everyone. KaZaA works for most people I know, from the indie rock fans, to the hip-hop fans, to the jazz fans.

        eDonkey is good for large files, albeit slow. I've been using BitTorrent for a lot of my large files (the latest buffy and anime fansubs) lately, although I don't know if this counts as P2P.

        I took your advice and grabbed gtk-gnutella (there was a recent release, so I didn't see the need to get the CVS). I'll have to use it some more, but it seems like the same old beast to me. Will give it some more time, though.
        • eDonkey is good for large files, albeit slow. I've been using BitTorrent for a lot of my large files (the latest buffy and anime fansubs) lately, although I don't know if this counts as P2P.

          Sure, you are (potentially) downloading from several people and, at the same time, uploading to several others. Relatively centralized (but that's why it works so well, IMO).

          • Re:Bittorrent (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Anenga ( 529854 )
            The problem with BitTorrent is that it's system is flawed. When you close the window after downloading, your not sharing anymore. Thus people often find they can download 80% of the file and can't ever get the rest. Thus, only downloading 0day releases within a few days of their release is only when BitTorrent works well.

            Also, you can't search on BitTorrent. You have to find websites to download from. If the website gets shut down, so does the ability to get the files.

            • Re:Bittorrent (Score:3, Informative)

              by harmonica ( 29841 )
              Thus, only downloading 0day releases within a few days of their release is only when BitTorrent works well.

              True (from my limited experience), but it still is p2p, even if it is specialized.

              Also, you can't search on BitTorrent. You have to find websites to download from. If the website gets shut down, so does the ability to get the files.

              Yes, but again, BT is a specialized p2p tool, not flawed. It cannot (and probably never wanted to) replace protocols like those used with Freenet or Gnutella.

              The design goal [bitconjurer.org] was to make big files available to a relatively large number of people who know exactly what they want, with everyone participating in sharing the load.

              But you made me think about a definition of p2p. I would probably come up with something very general.

              A slide [frii.com] I found suggests that there is no consensus on the term. searchNetworking [techtarget.com] has a more precise definition. Hm, I'll do some reading...
        • Is the NNTP protocol. NNTP Peer to NNTP Peer, and then I grab the files from them. Works well, especially keeping SVCDs on the BTVS episode I just watched on TV. a.b.m.b-v-s
      • I agree with you... I had been using other Gnutella clones for some time, and they quickly began to return less and less results, and far fewer downloads ever completed. I installed the CVS version of GTK-Gnutella and it Gnutella was rejuvenated. With all the bandwidth controls and compressed connections, I can keep the upstream bandwidth usage down without lossing any functionality. It also allows me to keep it on longer, since I don't need to exit just to give some more bandwidth to other apps.

        Swarming et al do a good job of finishing more downloads, and speeding up the process most of the time as well. I'm a convert. I was astonished by the improvements that have happened since I last used it.

        My only objection would be how it wastes so much screen space with borders and the like.

  • How does one "block" hostile clients? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by McCart42 ( 207315 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:41PM (#5418797) Homepage
    I would think that it would be fairly trivial to get past any blocks of a certain P2P agent (with an upgrade of the software, that is)...is there some information about the protocol that makes each client unique, and constantly so; i.e., upgrades to the software cannot change this identifying bit of the protocol for the client?
    • " How does one "block" hostile clients?"

      Cock-blocking?

      I see your P2P is as big as mine!

    • Re:How does one "block" hostile clients? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 1nv4d3r ( 642775 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:46PM (#5418820)
      Any client can lie in the next upgrade, so a good option is usually to block based on behavior. In other words, no matter what client you claim to be, if you send me more than x requests/second for longer than y minutes, you're disconnected.

      The other benefit of rules like this is that you don't discriminate one bad client; you discriminate against actions that hurt the network. As long as it plays nice any client is fine.

  • This guy is a developer? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:41PM (#5418798)
    From the GDF:

    "......You could have just left it alone...but unfortunately you decided to have yourself added to the...
    [flames=on]
    RETARD LIST! YOU F#$@ING IMBECILE! I DONT EVEN NEED TO ARGUE ON THE MERITS WITH YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THE **ONLY** JACKASS WHO OFFERRED TO IMPLEMENT G2 BEFORE THE SPECS WERE RELEASED! GUESS WHAT DUDE! YOUR CLIENT SUCKS A BIG FAT DONKEY'S DICK! NO WONDER MORPHEUS DUMPED IT LIKE THE STEAMING HALF COILED TURD THAT IT IS!
    [flames=off]......."

    This guy is a developer? That's pathetic, this looks like something a ten year old posted.

    If you are wondering what client he is speaking of, he is talking about Gnucleus.

    • Re:This guy is a developer? (Score:4, Funny)

      by grumpygrodyguy ( 603716 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @03:24PM (#5419686)
      This guy is a developer? That's pathetic, this looks like something a ten year old posted.

      Maybe he's a ten year old developer.
    • I'm just shedding some light on the situation since I interact with the author of those posts. His actions may seem childish, but given the terrible form of the MP people I can't blame him from losing it. When you see your hard work stolen by a bunch of two-bit criminals (the Shareaza folks) - people you have TRIED to reach out to and compromise with, only to be lied to repeatedly - you can get a little hot under the collar.
      • No, they are childish and unwarrented. There aren't any excuses for that behavior.

        If the GDF would of acted mature in reaction to Gnutella2 when it was first proposed to the GDF, then this would of never of happened. Gnutella2 would of replaced Gnutella1 and remained "Gnutella". Or at least the GDF could of discussed G2 in a technical context, which did not happen.

        No "hard work" was stolen. Shareaza did not use GUESS in any way to create G2, so I hope that's not what your implying. Sure, G2 uses some things discussed within the GDF. But anybody can suggest concepts, but it's not as easy when you go and try to code it in.

        Look at GUESS. How long was that discussed? Now that's dropped for "Outdegree", something Gnutella2 came up with.

        The GDF needs to let their death-grip of the Gnutella throne go and accept Mike as a legitimate contributer trying to help.
    • This guy acts like an ass all the time apparently. If you consider that he's trying to make money with his software you soon realize he's cheesed because this other guy came in and scooped him and the other sleeping beauties on several features. Where they came from really isn't important, they fact he did it in record time without co-towing to them is what set him off more than anything else. More power to those who innovate and actually get something done rather than talking about it forever. If the other guys can out innovate/feature this guy's client then I'd support them; it's all about the best working client. So slap a tampon between your legs, stop crying like a woman and get busy guys.

    • hmm, sounds like an average day on the Linux Kernel list.. ;-)
  • While there seems to genuine issues here, I get the impression that neither side is being entirely forthcoming on this situation.

  • Spellcheck (Score:1, Troll)

    by arvindn ( 542080 )
    Three leading Gnultella services voice their opinions on Gnutella2 or Mike's Protocol as they refer to it as. None of the three recognize Gnutella2 as true Gnutella and worry its propritary protocol will divide the Gnutella community.

    Dozens of disgusted slashdotters voice their anger at /. editors or lazy-morons-who-can't-spellcheck as they refer to them as. None of the irate posters recognize /. stories as true English and worry its brain-damagedness will make the subscribers a laughing stock.

  • Vinnie is a pathetic troll (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:50PM (#5418834)
    Here's what happened today on the Gnutella Developers Forum [zeropaid.com]

    Vinnie says Shareaza is damaging the Gnutella network. Well, his own words are blackening the public's view of ALL Gnutella developers. He himself should be banned from Gnutella, period.

    Consider this: most people do not visit the GDF group. So when Vinnie makes an ass out of himself, most people just see his words, and assume that he represents all the other Gnutella developers. People see Vinnie flaming, spewing insults left and right. What are people supposed to think?

    Vinne, it\'s alright to make points such as "Shareaza is flooding the network with requests." But when you say things such as "YOU ARE A F#$@ING MORON YOU GODDAMNED SON OF A WHORE," you have gone way past the line.

    "I've tried being civil"
    If such behavior is what you define as civil...

    "I suggest other developers "
    Wait, Vinnie, you make it sound like you represent the WHOLE Gnutella community. However, this statement makes it sound like there hasn't been a complete agreement yet, and that this is more your own personal opinion. Has an official decision been made or not?

    "YOUR CLIENT SUCKS A BIG FAT DONKEY'S DICK!"
    So this is what Gnutella developers are like? Freely bashing other people's work and insulting them when all they have done is try to improve the network. I guess I'll make sure to avoid Gnutella developers at all costs, they sound nasty. Or maybe it's just Vinnie.

    Last question: why have I not negatively responded to Adam Fisk? Because he has been civil. You have not.

  • lost end-user focus (Score:5, Funny)

    by 1nv4d3r ( 642775 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @12:52PM (#5418845)
    When did we lose focus on creating the greatest Porn2Pr0n system possible?

    These guys should stop bickering and ask themselves every day:
    - How can gnutella deliver more pr0n, faster, with more accurate search results?

    I know I do, and I don't even develop P2P systems.
  • BearShare: Currently, the end user is able to specify the frequency of the query; this is inappropriate. The user has the ability to set the query rate to give a DoS (Denial of Service) attack effect on the network. The download-retry interval is additionally adjustable, which causes a DoS attack effect on individual hosts. These are hostile actions. Additionally this constant hammering gives an unfair advantage in that the client using friendly querying does not receive the same attention as the client using hostile querying which uses up all available network resources.

    Don't I also have the ability to modify these values in the open source gtk-gnutella program? Good lord, this has to be the whiniest interview I have ever read.
    • Whiny? Yep. Incorrect? Nope. It's always been a problem of P2P that one group of people is able to leech of another - as long as the leeching group is small enough. This is exactly what happens here, with the added problem that a large enough leeching group could end up killing the network altogether.

      • Re:So they're against open source too? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TRACK-YOUR-POSITION ( 553878 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @02:24PM (#5419299)
        Whiny? Yep. Incorrect? Nope. It's always been a problem of P2P that one group of people is able to leech of another - as long as the leeching group is small enough.

        Irrelevant? Yes. If a P2P service isn't resilient against rogue leeches (since, like any parasite, a leech does not seek to consume enough to destroy its host), surely it will be completely crushed by industry or government attempts to eliminate file sharing. A P2P service MUST be written as though the user can modify any behavior they wish, because whether it's open source or requires reverse engineering, the user CAN modify any behavior they wish given sufficient time.

        In fact, these minor threats faced by P2P networks now are actually GOOD--they force networks to develop strategies to deal with a hostile world.

        • Re:So they're against open source too? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by koh ( 124962 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @03:12PM (#5419621) Journal
          And you, my friend, just have made the best point of this entire thread : the fact that shareaza may or may not flood the network is irrelevant, because a good p2p network should not be that easy to flood in the first place.

          May I add that such flooding prevention is best implemented by coding a defensive let-through behavior that is not based on servent banning based on client name ?

          Every piece of software may have bugs. Any p2p incarnation may flood or corrupt the network, be it willingly or not. Banning a vendor name only spawns more flames.

          • Too true! (Score:3, Informative)

            by Tomble ( 579119 )
            because a good p2p network should not be that easy to flood in the first place.
            GNUnet [ovmj.org] is pretty good in this regard, as its clients remember the behaviour their peers, and adjust their behaviour towards them accordingly- a little like MojoNation's system of credits... except that it's purely peer-to-peer, without a central system even to arbitrate the credit (which in GNUnet is modelled as trust rather than anything like money, so it's a non-zero-sum game in game theory terminology, and new nodes start off untrusted, but untrusted peers are not ignored if there is low load).

            Apart from being flood-resistant and having no central server to shut down, GNUnet has such advantages as...
            propagating chunks of files through the network (to improve availability, speed up downloads and reduce overall network load),
            whilst being pretty much uncensorable (organisation FOO can do practically nothing to stop access to stuff they don't want shared, and neither can individuals- this also cuts down any claims of culpability of people using the network),
            and of course utterly anonymous (do Kazaa, Bittorrent, Gnutella, etc give you this? Why should they? Well for a start, if anybody sharing anything gets targetted by groups like RIAA, etc, rightly or wrongly, then you get no damned network, thats why. Consider those Danish people who got hit for ~$100,000 lawsuits a few months back for sharing files on a p2p network. Still not interested in anonymity?)

            I may have missed some detail out or described something wrongly. The main site has a lot of papers describing things in great detail for those that care, but seriously, whenever I've thought I've seen some flaw in the design, I've found out I was wrong. The design is practically bulletproof AFAICT.

            There are only really 2 disadvantages with GNUnet currently:
            (1)- It's under heavy development, so even though it's usable, you should upgrade often, and
            (2)- It's not usable under windows yet. That's partly down to compatibility issues, which are being dealt with, and partly because the GNUnet team don't want to be dealing with the vast number of questions and complaints that would come from lots of Windows users (not a flame on windows users, there are simply so many more of them of course). They'd rather get most of the development and bug-hunting done first before opening the floodgates. But in due course, the project will be complete and usuable to whoever.

            If you're a *nix user, why not take a look. If not, bookmark the site, and watch out maybe every few months or so. It won't take forever.

            • I've looked at GNUnet briefly. I'm a Freenet user. The two projects seem to have quite a few similarities.



              Is there anyone out there who knows both GNUnet and Freenet well enough to write up a good document describing each one's relative strengths and weaknesses?

  • Now, I (as usual) see a lot of posts complaining about the grammar in the submission, especially the part that goes "Mike's Protocol as they refer to it as". Heck, you may even think it's stupid. But like my mother always said: "Stupid is as as stupid as does."

    As.

  • Gnutella is not nearly the best protocol out there. Kazaa's FastTrack network has immensely more files available, and is much faster. With FastTrack the searches are faster and the downloads are faster. A download can be split across multiple sources to increase speed. (Actually, I think Gnutella does support this, but the application I use most often, Limewire for Mac OS X, does not.) For movies, the eDonkey network seems much better equipped than Gnutella. Something needs to happen with Gnutella, or else it just won't pan out.
    • Saying the *protocol* is better or worse, depending on what is available on the network is ludicrous.

      Its the number and quality of the *users* that effect that..

      Ok so I'm nitpicking.. but its true.
      • I don't think I said that one network has more files available than any other. What I did say is that eDonkey seems to handle movie files better than Gnutella and that FastTrack searches for files faster and downloads them faster. That really doesn't have anything to do with the users. I would say it is more reliant on the application than on the protocol itself, however.
        • From the wording at the beginning, it appeared that was was the intent of your post, to say the protocol was some how related to the quality / amount of files available..

          Perhaps not your intent, sorry about that..

          True though, better protocols would *tend* to have more users, but it isn't a hard relation that *beacuse* of X, Y is happening...

  • University papers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sean23007 ( 143364 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @01:09PM (#5418912) Homepage Journal
    I would venture to say that more University papers deal with Gnutella or are based on Gnutella than any other P2P protocol.

    If anything were known about the FastTrack network, I would venture to say that many more papers would be written about it than about Gnutella.

  • yay gnutella 2 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jilles ( 20976 )
    Shareaza is actually the first gnutella client that has worked somewhat reliable for me (as in you find stuff, you download it and it works). And unlike the angry three gnutella proponents, Shareaza comes without spyware/ads.

    I strongly suspect that that is because of the excellent changes that were made in the protocol by Shareaza. The gnutella 0.6 network may be larger as is claimed in the article (I strongly doubt this though, most of my downloads come from shareaza users), but it is also far less efficient.

    The reason these companies are so pissed is because shareaza's creator came to the conclusion that the design by comittee strategy wasn't delivering much results and just implemented what he thought would work. That maybe is not a nice thing to do and certainly the decision to claim the gnutella 2 name is dubious. Fact is that it is working really well.

    What they should do instead of bitching about Shareaza, is fix their clients. Gnutella 0.6 (which is what they still use) is flawed, not very scalable and less efficient than most of the other p2p protocols (including gnutella 2). They should politely ask Shareaza's creator to document the protocol (as he has promised to do) and implement the changes (or similar improvements) in their own clients. Until then, I'm a happy shareaza user and a unhappy gnutella 0.6 user.

  • So have you used it? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by soupdevil ( 587476 )
    Mike may be young and naive, and a bit arrogant. But Shareaza is the most robust, feature-filled Gnutella client there is, and he did it all by himself. That's impressive.

    FastTrack is proprietary and under attack, the donkey depends on central servers and Gnutella is stagnant. Assuming Mike releases the specs this month (as he's promised), we'll have an open source, server-free, super-scaling, global searching P2P network. We've never had one, and that's exciting.

    The fact that Shareaza is free as in beer and free as in of-spyware/addware is just a bonus.
    • Assuming Mike releases the specs this month (as he's promised), we'll have an open source, server-free, super-scaling, global searching P2P network.

      Open-source ?? Should I understand that Mike declared he would open the complete source code of Shareaza as well as the MP specs ?

      AFAIK this is not the case. May you be so kind as providing a link ? And mention the licence used ?

  • Is there another free client? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @01:58PM (#5419154) Homepage
    I use Shareaza because it doesn't bundle any adware, doesn't bundle any spyware, and doesn't do anything but file sharing. BearShare still has adware in it. Are there other clients that don't include the crap and still provide the function? (And no, I haven't touched the timeout settings, nor do I intend to.)

    FWIW, BearShare's complaining seems motivated at least in part by the fact that Shareaza is out there potentially taking away its revenues...
    • I don't know about Xolox or BearShare, but Limewire is open source, and the cvs version does not contain adware. http://www.limewire.org if you are interested. It's not as convienient as just downloading from the website, obviously, but it does get you an ad-free version of the client.

  • what a soap opera! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The problem with Gnutella and GDF is that it's a true soap opera with a few developers, that do not like each other that much. Well, as long as e.g. Bearshare can take control and distribute it's spyware, all of it's own proprietary extensions or seperation of the Gnutella network were fine. There are so many selfish facts and quotes from GDF developers in the past... I can't take them serious anymore! For example read what "holly" Bearshare developer states:

    Vinnie (who owns gnutella3.com) has said that Bearshare will be "moving forward with our own proprietary Gnutella 3 technology". He has also stated that "Our goal is not to block Shareaza from the network, but rather to give their users the worst possible experience so they will stop using the application. I'll leave it up to your imagination as for the methods we will employ". Some reports say that a block may already be in place in the latest version of Bearshare.

    From http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=90 [slyck.com]

    Civil war among Gnutella developers is not somthing new!
    Every good client hiting Gnutella was usually accused being bad or crap. Once it was Phex, then Xolox, today it's Shareaza. Even well integrated features like 'swarmed downloading' were once rated "bad" from those developers who didn't have it in their own clients - now it's standard in every client. Bearshare has a long tradition of hidden features (not available to other vendors) or in suddenly blocking one competitor. Is there any Gnutella client that wasn't blocked or bitched in the past? I doubt that.

    It's a long history of bitching against each other... not efficient work but indeed amusing. New ideas on the GDF looks more like "eat it or die" than a detailed and productive discussion. Other ideas are optimized for marketing instead for technology... Limewire decided to call it's superpeer concept "Ultrapeer" to make it look better than other P2P systems (even though it wasn't even reliabale - is it today or does it need more patches called GUESS2, GUESS3 HYPERMEGAGUESS?).

    Of course there are exception! I'd like to name two: For exmaple one open source developer, John from Gnucleus, has written lines and lines of free code. Continously implementing new features while at the same time avoiding (the worst) GDF fights. For example, the Gnutella protocol documentation at http://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] mainly from Tor Klingberg & Raphael Manfredi - which was started long after the big ones had there userbase already (no papers prolly to keep new developers away and to increase greedy spyware businees plans? *asking*). I hope those guys and also Shareaza keep their motivation to innovate and help the Gnutella community. For those who believe the latest Bearwire hype (Bearwire = Bearshare + Limewire business alliance), I suggest speak with some other developers.... log on to irc.p2pchat.net ... AFAIK some Gnutella clients run a home channel there and you can meet develoepers as well.

    I recomend to read the GDF archives and please poste some of the most funniest quote. Let's make a Gnutella soap opera best of. :)

    Greets, Mark

    PS: I wonder why Xolox sneaks to the side of Bearshare and Limewire. strange. well, must be one rules of a true soap opera: suprising changes or dead twin brothers popping up from nowhere.
    • As long as greed or fame is the fuel for development, there will be no real progress.

      It's no coincidence that Linus Torvalds grew up in socialist Finland, and from that upbringing went on to do the work he did.

      The U.S. is just not capable of producing people like him.
  • In 6-12 months from now, if anybody asks how Microsoft managed to conquer the P2P marked so fast, simply point them back to this thread to show them the state of quibbling between all the other players.

    What they should have done is gang up against Microsoft with open standards and inventive forward thinking and not simply try to use P2P as a scheme to get rich quickly.

  • My Experience (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02, 2003 @02:30PM (#5419374)
    I used to use Limewire all the time, but it was written in Java so it was (a) slow and (b) had its own set of menu/window widgets, which made it a pain to use. The only files I ever found were popular music that I didn't need, Futurama episodes (okay - that part was good), and faked porn files that had links to paysites encoded inside.

    I switch to Shareaza. It's small. First thing I notice is that the user interface is GREAT. Seriously, you have to be smoking crack to think its user interface is bad. It keeps me informed about my searches, uses the OS' native widgets, is FAST and best of all, I have never seen so many responses to my searches. Whether that is becuase of "Gnutella2" or something else I don't know, and don't care. When you're trying to download movies of Anna Ohura at 3am, you want what works, it's that simple.

    And Shareaza doesn't include spyware crap.
  • Remember Windows 2.0?
    IPv5?
    No.
    Just go straight ahead and skip it, just make sure you agree on something better :)

    Kjella
  • I can't believe that when I searched the list of replies to this article there is no mention of Gnucleus [gnucleus.com]. Not only is it open source, but there is not spyware or anoying pop-up ads in the program. I have used quite a few different Gnutella clients and I have found gnucleus to be one of the better. Sadly, they don't have a linux verison, but you can get the source and probably figure out a way to make it work on Linux or you could just run it in on linux using a windows emulator like Wine [winehq.com].

  • Mike's response (Score:3, Informative)

    by soupdevil ( 587476 ) on Sunday March 02, 2003 @05:16PM (#5420303)
    Check out this thread on Shareaza's forum if you want to read Mike's thoughtful response to Vinnie.

    http://www.shareaza.com/forum/viewthread.aspx?ID =5 138
  • ...is that Shareaza is free of ads and spyware, and give the end user the best experience that can be had on any Gnutella class clients. That's what matters in the end.

    I'm also sorry I supported Limewire twice by purchasing the pro edition to support their efforts. Wasted money. Live and learn I guess.

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